This is why Google Voice is awesome. You can whitelist or blacklist easily, without knowing anything advanced about phone systems. Thus it's almost impossible to be trolled or scammed this way at your actual Google number, and since that's the number you would give out, your number you actually forward to can be changed whenever necessary.

"Off the grid" meaning remote areas the devs haven't carefully planned for you to visit. Places most players aren't expected to explore and never do.

SWG certainly had that. I'm guessing EQ and UO did as well, though I never played those. WoW did as well, though those were mostly areas accessible only by exploit. You could, however, visit the unfinished area under Stormwind without using an exploit.

Exploring areas I'm expected to just makes it almost meaningless for me. I at least want the illusion that my presence there was not really expected by anyone.

If you like having all the areas already explored with roadmaps and videos online to help you find them, GW2 exploration is great. There's literally nothing "off the grid" to explore though. It's all pre-planned jumping puzzles and vistas. Don't expect to find anything there isn't already a screenshot of somewhere online.

The exploration in GW2 actually really disappointed me, because it's all planned out for you.

Although as you point out, it's better than exploration was in WoW if you exclude areas you weren't supposed to be able to get to at all.

Of course, for me that's where the real exploration was in WoW. Old Ironforge, CoT during vanilla, finding an exploit that let us get all the way to the edge of the world, Mount Hyjal during vanilla.. it's been years, and I still distinctly remember doing all those things, how I did them, and who I did them with. Nothing memorable about exploring in GW2 for me.

I did play Eve for a while, and it has the complexity I want. The thing that I just never could learn to like was the personal disconnect of always being in a spaceship (yes, I did see CQ, didn't mean much) and the actual gameplay of flying a ship just felt a little too simplistic and repetitive to me. Also, being the only player in anything larger than a frigate just felt wrong. Always wished they'd implemented ship stations something like what Artemis offers. http://www.artemis.eochu.com/

If there's anything I really miss from MMOs, it's doing world PvP with my Druid in WoW TBC.

Completely agree about complexity. I can't stand the trends of over-simplifying things. I got in the ESO closed beta this weekend and barely made it a couple hours before getting bored. Barely lasted longer in NWO a couple months ago.

Even GW2 is disappointing. Half your skills are determined by your weapon, and often the different skills on the weapon don't even make sense together. It also didn't take long for players to narrow down one or two optimal builds for each class so you really can't even experiment there unless you really like to solo. After the original GW, it's such a regression. And getting rid of a dedicated healing class did them no favors. It devolves the gameplay into little more than DPS races. Everyone has a dodge ability to avoid damage, because they have to, because there's no one to heal them if they get hit. The personal heals only help with the odd splash damage here and there. So it's all just DPS and dodging. That's what you get when you make a pointed effort at removing the "trinity".

Auto-matchups for group runs have killed much social behavior that existed prior. Yes, waiting around town spamming trade for hours at a time wasn't very fun. But in a way, it forced socialization, it forced people to remember "ok, this guy is a pretty damn good tank, I'm going to put him on my friends list and we'll blast through shit together"...now, it's just click a button, and wait. Once you're done, likelihood of you ever talking to anyone from that group ever again is practically nil.

That was what completely killed it for me. I play MMOs for the virtual world experience; I couldn't care less about instances other than running them a couple times for the experience of doing it.

The battlegrounds were bad enough, but arenas were one of the worst PvP ideas they implemented during the time I played (I quit early during Cata).